UK Officials are Going to Deliberately Crash Drones into Planes

These days you can barely turn around before being confronted with a billion different stories about commercial airliners having some close calls with drones. Now plans have been revealed to see just how much danger there is, and it genuinely involves crashing drones into planes.

The £250,000 plan involves the Department of Transport, Civil Aviation Authority, and the Ministry of Defence, with tests being carried out in a 5,000 square miles of restricted airspace in Snowdonia.

The Ministry of Defence's Dr Peter Downer said this to the Daily Mail:

We are conducting mid-air collision studies for the CAA to look at impact of aircraft with unmanned vehicles.

There is a series of trials about the security risks and we need to continue this with a commercial study. There will be further studies of mid-air collisions of drone impact with fuselage and windows.

With at least two million drones zipping through the British skies, and plenty more on the way, the idea is to test the potential ramifications of a mid-flight collision on almost-empty aircraft. It also sounds like an awful lot of fun, since there isn't a person alive who wouldn't enjoy being payed to fly stuff into each other. It's all in the name of science, of course, just with a very Mythbusters-style process. [Daily Mail via The Next Web]